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Here is an update on the results of our FOIA requests and our winter and spring activities.   Trolling season has begun.  GLSI board members had some awesome coho fishing last weekend in St Joe.  East winds the last 2 days have slowed the bite but it will turn back on when the water sets up again.  Winter steelheading was good to great at times in southwest Michigan.  Remember that steelhead limits are now reduced to one in some northern Michigan streams. See our post down on this page for details. 

In November, we expressed our concerns over the situation with not increasing king salmon stocking in Lake Michigan in 2022.  The MDNR and the Lake Michigan Citizens Fishery Advisory Committee agreed at their last meeting in 2021 to increase king stocking in Michigan waters from 654,000 kings up to 1 million.  Many of these fish would go to ports that had a history of strong survival and returns and where king planting was cut or eliminated in the past.   The Lake Michigan Committee, composed of representatives from the surrounding Lake Michigan states and CORA representing the Native American Tribes did not agree with this increase.
 
The GLSI filed FOIA requests for the meeting notes, minutes, and emails from the Lake Michigan Committee meetings in 2021.  We wanted to get a clear understanding of what led to this decision and to gain more knowledge on how these management decisions are made.  It is our belief this decision making process needs to be open and transparent to anglers.
Before we get into the results we obtained, we want to provide some background on the Lake Michigan Committee.   The committee is made of the biologists from the states and CORA and the goal is to manage Lake Michigan cooperatively using the best available science and data to make management decisions.   We agree with this approach.   Without it, it could lead to a stocking race with each agency maximizing stocking in their home water thus leading to an over stocking of the lake and collapse of the fishery.  The GLSI does not want to see that happen.  It was the Lake Michigan Committee that agreed to cut fish stocking in Lake Michigan to prevent a collapse of salmon similar to what happened on Lake Huron.  This has clearly worked, and we now see much larger and healthier fish and an expanding forage base.   This is the main reason we are pushing for king salmon stocking increases now.

Here are the results of our FOIA returns.   The MDNR responded first and very promptly to our request providing the meeting minutes before our FOIA was processed.  We appreciated that.  Illinois responded next but we spent months following up with the states of Wisconsin and Indiana to respond to our legally filed FOIA requests.  We spent hours pouring through the documents and emails and we can report we did not find any major concerns.   We could sum up our findings that the fisheries managers are still worried about over stocking the lake and want to be sure the fishery remains healthy.  They had previously agreed to wait 3 full years from the last stocking increase to evaluate it’s results and wanted to wait one more year to complete this evaluation before another increase.  It is our opinion they are being over cautious, but we also don’t want fisheries managers to be reckless.    We are going to continue to encourage more transparency in how this process works.   The consent decree negotiations loom large in this process and we hope they are settled with a fair deal for all soon.

We will have more updates in the coming weeks.   We have attended a number of fisheries management meetings this winter and are doing so this week at the Great Lake Fisheries Commission annual meetings for each of the Great Lakes.  A lot of research data and conclusions are being presented.  We attend these meetings to get the latest scientific data and advocate for our sport fishery.   We will be reporting on them. We are going to reach out to you to gauge support for harassing avian predators at stocking sites this spring to save our smolts.  This would take a big volunteer commitment to make it happen.  We are also planning a membership meeting for late April or early May.  More to come on this soon.


 

Our mailing address is:
Great Lakes Salmon Initiative
PO Box 189
Chelsea, MI 48118

Thank you for the update. I think there would be less suspicion of our appointment fisheries officials on the part of anglers if there were more transparency. I'm glad to hear that the stocking increase didn't happen only because of an abundance of caution and not because of a lack of desire to grow the salmon fishery. Hopefully the state of the fishery continues to improve and the stocking increases go into effect next year. 

Speaking of the health of Lake Michigan and its prey population, do you know when the data on the 2021 acoustic and bottom trawl surveys will become available for review? 

Bottom trawl and acoustic are being looked at now. I think in about a week that information will be available for public view.

Until the 2021 information is ready I do have some older information to look at.

Listened in last week to the state of the lake conference. It seemed 6 years classes of ales right now with 2020 being actually a pretty good year class making up a lot of the smaller fish. 2021 was a little below average. King weight dropped some from the high a couple years ago but overall still big health fish. Predator prey ratio was still in line. Looked to me some stocking increase room in the future.